Friday, March 30, 2012

Clarifying details about E17 and Compositing

I just wanted to take a moment to clarify the state of compositing with the Enlightenment desktop. In two recentreviews of Bodhi Linux the authors mucked up a few of the details concerning compositing and E17. I can't really fault them for their misinformation (as a whole both are really good write ups) because the details about compositing and E17 aren't very well documented. Today I would like to clarify a few things about using compositing with Enlightenment DR17.

First - there are currently two different compositing engines for Enlightenment. One of these is "Ecomorph" and it is the most commonly referenced when talking about compositing and E17. Ecomorph is not housed in the official E SVN and is not installed in Bodhi by default (you can find details on getting the Ecomorph source code here). Ecomorph is a slightly rough port of the famous "compiz fusion" for Enlightenment. It does not provide a consistent experience across a variety of hardware and it is no longer under active development - thus it is not recommended for usage.

For those who want a pleasant compositing experience with Enlightenment the E team has been developing their own compositing manager from scratch. E's compositing manager functions either via a software engine or with OpenGL support. This compositing engine is not based on, nor does it have any ties to Compiz. This is also the compositing engine you will find in use on the "Compositing" profile Bodhi ships with. This engine is not as feature rich as Compiz as of yet, but slowly it is gaining more and more advanced features.

If you have any questions or if anything is still unclear feel free to drop a comment below.

8 comments:

When I turn on the composting or sometimes turn it off, half of the screen gets black. I have nvidia geforce 7050/nforce 610i and the latest nvidia driver is installed. Then I have to delete .e direcotry to get rid of it.What may be the reason for this half black screen?

Your 'Scale Windows' Pager in the picture (shown above) seems to be capable to show the given background image of the different desktops. How would you achieve that? I only get the background image of the current desktop, for all the desktops of the pager.

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